Origins

Born in the deep south and now residing in Brooklyn, NY, Julia Easterlin is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose work has taken her from her family’s farm in rural Georgia to collaborations and international tours with artists like Jacob Collier, Bill T. Jones, Kris Bowers, and Vieux Farka Toure. She has performed with her project Touristes at NYC’s Celebrate Brooklyn festival, as well as her own slot at Lollapalooza.

In 2019, she performed her unreleased song “Stay” and won a talent competition adjudicated by T-Pain, and in 2020, Jacob Collier’s song “He Won’t Hold You (feat. Rapsody)”, for which she provided vocals, won a GRAMMY. She has released one EP (Vestiges), one collaborative album (Touristes, with Malian guitar legend Vieux Farka Toure) and one solo album (Light of a Strange Day) to critical acclaim.

Easterlin first learned to sing while wandering around the woods as a child on her family’s pine farm. “The echo is great in that forest. I still love it.” A few years later, she began singing in church - though she stresses that it was the music that brought her into the sanctuary and kept her there: 

 “My mom - whose family is partly Jewish, a little Quaker, a bit Catholic and religiously noncommital -  took me aside and said, ‘They’re going to say some things here that maybe we don’t believe. But the music is GREAT! Soak it up. This is your musical education.’ Choir really shaped my love of music. …Singing with people is such a primal human experience. It opens your body, in a way. Singing to people came later. And it scared the s**t out of me.”

As a young performer, Easterlin pushed through extreme stage fright. “I’d freeze. Every time. Once, someone had to literally shove me onto the stage. I’d perform and then cry my eyes out afterwards. Sometimes I’d get sick. I have no idea why I wanted to keep doing it.”

But she did. Avidly. As a high school student, she performed at The GRAMMYs, and later attended Berklee College of Music, where she perfected her vocal looping technique while studying sound engineering. After college, she moved to New York and began her career in earnest. 

These days, she’s a seasoned professional who brings to her performances the wonder and space of her childhood in the woods. Julia says in her best moments as a performer, she feels she’s tapping into something else. She describes it like a trance - calm, deep, full, difficult to remember. And her audiences seem to agree.  

Amory Sivertson of WBUR says, “Watching Julia perform feels like a religious experience — she’s both totally in control and completely surrendering to the music,” while Jon Schaefer of WNYC, calls Easterlin’s music “lovely and unsettling. Brightly arranged and shot through with darkness. …Striking.”

Of her ambitions, Julia says, “I’m not good at speculating or enterprising - I’d be a bad investment banker. But I’m good at looking absurdity square in the eyeball. That’s my gift - sitting with strangeness, picking it apart and making something that feels beautiful and helpful to me. That’s what I try to do with my music, with my lyrics and with my voice.”

I’m curious about her ’why’, so I ask her, “Why do you perform?” She’s quiet, eyes scanning some invisible point on the ceiling, “I guess I do it, because it feels like the best way I know how to be good; It feels correct.”

• Alex Moldovian, writer

Frequent Collaborators

—

Martin Nevin
Bass

Jason Burger
Drums